High rising terminal

The high rising terminal (HRT), also known as uptalk, upspeak, rising inflection, or high rising intonation (HRI), is a feature of some accents of English where declarative sentences are uttered with rising intonation.

Empirically, one report proposes that HRT in American English and Australian English is marked by a high tone (high pitch or high fundamental frequency) beginning on the final accented syllable near the end of the statement (the terminal), and continuing to increase in frequency (up to 40%) to the end of the intonational phrase.[1] New research suggests that the actual rise can occur one or more syllables after the last accented syllable of the phrase, and its range is much more variable than previously thought.[2]

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The origins of HRT remain uncertain. Geographically, anecdotal evidence places the conception of the American English variety on the West Coast – anywhere from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest.[3]

With respect to the southern hemisphere, it has been suggested that the feature may have originated in New Zealand.[4]

It is unclear whether the American English varieties and the Oceanic varieties had any influence on each other regarding the spread of HRT.

In the United States, the phenomenon of HRT may be fairly recent but is an increasingly common characteristic of speech especially among younger speakers (see [5] for one of the few accounts of HRT in American English). However, serious scientific/linguistic inquiry on this topic has a much more extensive history in linguistic journals from Australia, New Zealand, and Britain where HRT seems to have been noted as early as World War II.

Although it is ridiculed in Britain as "Australian question intonation" (AQI) and blamed on the popularity of Australian soap operas among teenagers, HRT is also a feature of several UK dialects, especially in the mid-Ulster and Belfast variants.

A 1986 report stated that in Sydney, it is used more than twice as often by young generations as by older ones, and particularly by women.[6] It has been suggested that the HRT has a facilitative function in conversation (i.e., it encourages the addressee to participate in the conversation),[citation needed] and such functions are more often used by women. It also subtly indicates that the speaker is "not finished yet", thus perhaps discouraging interruption.[4][6][2] Its use is also suggestive of seeking assurance from the listener that they are aware of what the speaker is referring to.[citation needed]

Although several personalities in the popular media in Australia, Britain, and the United States have negatively portrayed the usage of HRT, claiming that its use is exhibiting a speaker's insecurities about the statement, more recent evidence shows that leaders of the peer group are more likely to use HRT in their declaratives than the junior members of the particular peer group.[2][7][8] According to University of Pennsylvania phonologist Mark Liberman, George W. Bush began to use HRT extensively in his speeches as his presidency continued.[9] Linguist Robin Lakoff drew attention to the pattern in her book Language and Women's Place, which argued that women were socialized to talk in ways that lacked power, authority, and confidence. Rising intonation on declarative sentences was one of the features Lakoff included in her description of "women's language," a gendered speech style which in her view both reflected and reproduced its users' subordinate social status.

^McLemore, C.A. (1991). "The Pragmatic Interpretation of English Intonation: Sorority Speech". Dissertation Abstracts International A: The Humanities and Social Sciences52 (4): 1311–A.

^Cheng, W.; Warren, M. (2005). "//CAN i help you //: The use of rise and rise-fall tones in the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English". International Journal of Corpus Linguistics10 (1): 85–107. doi:10.1075/ijcl.10.1.05che. ISSN1384-6655.